AVS. Arkitektúr verktækni skipulag - 01.12.2004, Page 56

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by Toyo Ito
Observatory Tower-
Tifré œW'
Dr. Halldóra Arnardóttir, Art Historian, Javier Sánchez Merina, Architect
Water & Energy Museum
rgia
Main Entrance-
^cceso\|Drincip

L

“ Wsl
JHH
í garðinum verður byggt safn tileinkað vatni og orku, útsýnisturn, dagheimili, áningarhús og nokkrar brýr. / In the
garden there will be built a museum dedicated to water and power, view-tower, day-care centre, rest rooms and
several bridges.
“Through the centuries public gar-
dens have been the stage for a
perfect connection between the
natural and the cultural world.
What should be the frame for a
19th century public garden? How
should the Gavira-garden look? Our
proposal is founded on a frame for
an ecological system. This ecology
is however not ideology. It is not a
system which governs people, but
on the contrary encourages freedom
of expression. This proposal is in
other words a flexible system where
the purification of the water is con-
nected to the cleansing of the spirit
and the soul.
At the beginning of the 20th century
Le Corbusier proposed tree-houses
to change Paris into a green city.
With the objective of making the
Gavia-garden a fertile and green
area we propopse the planting of
water-trees."
This is how the ambitious job
description of the Japanese archi-
tect Toyo Ito for the Gavia public
garden in the suburb Vallecas in
Madrid started. He received the
commission last year after having
won an international competition for
a public garden where purified and
filtered drainage is reused for plants
and animals.
Water courses
His proposal is based on landscape
which resembles outline plan where
water plays the main role. Water
covers almost a third of the 36 hec-
tares of the final surface area of the
garden. It plays an important educa-
tional role through reuse, biological
purification processes, water-life
systems and aesthetic value of the
water in the landscape.
The basic type of the “water-trees“
is made up of four “water-trees“,
type A that purify the water and
another six “water-trees“, type B,
connected to pastime. Both types
follow the same fractile pattern - the
relative relationship of a fraction of
any object is similar to the relation-
ship of larger or smaller fractions as
can be seen in the leaves of plants
and how they are subdivided into
fractions or units which have the
same formal relationship.
The circulation starts with water
being pumped from the purification
station in “water-tree“ A where the
biochemical oxygen demand (BOD)
drops from 20 to 2 units. Here the
water, in a four day purification
process passes through different
filters and settlement processes. To
begin with the water goes through
a rough gravel filter. The microbes,
living at the bottom, dissolve the
biological matter, water plants
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